The Joint Program Office for Combating Terrorist Use of Explosives recently marked its one-year anniversary and is beginning to tick off items on a long list of recommendations designed to thwart terrorists from employing bombs on U.S. soil.
This is despite having no budget or permanent location, said the FBI’s Barbara Martinez, who serves as the office’s director.
The effort to bring together all the players in the federal government who have a role in preventing terrorist bombings began after President George W. Bush signed Homeland Security Presidential Directive-19 in February 2007.
Led by the Department of Justice, with the Department of Homeland Security as a full partner, it is beginning to work its way through 36 recommendations on the list, she said.
One of the office’s goals is to get a handle on the myriad federal programs that are addressing the improvised bomb issue. Many of the DHS’ component agencies such as the Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard all have stakes in the problem. The department has a small office of bombing prevention and its science and technology directorate has a division dedicated to conventional explosives research and development efforts. Justice has a bomb data center and the national center for explosives training and research.
“We’re not going to replace things that are out there. We’re going to leverage things that are out there,” Martinez said at the Gov Sec conference in Washington, D.C.
This comes out of necessity since it has no budget of its own. It is staffed by personnel who serve in various federal agencies. It does not have the ability to start its own technology programs, for example. The attorney general oversees its efforts. State Department and Defense Department officials are also part of the group. The charter calls for the office to lean on the Defense Department’s experiences in combating roadside bombs and other kinds of improvised explosive devices.
“It’s a bit of a struggle to get people out of their foxholes” to share data, she admitted.
The Justice Department inspector general in an October report suggested that there was still work to be done. It showed that two of its component agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI were “not adequately coordinating explosives related operations and have developed similar technical abilities to respond to explosives incidents.”
They maintain separate databases on forensic reports, incident reporting, intelligence and technical information. Without better coordination, the agencies increase the risk that the Justice Department will not meet its HSPD-19 requirements to create a united, multi-layered strategy to mitigate the explosives threat, the report said.
Information sharing and collaboration are buzzwords, Martinez said. However, these are two of the office’s major goals. The JPO addresses this by trying to make more visible what the other agencies are doing. The office can also inform the research and development community on what technologies are being worked on in order to avoid redundancies, Martinez said.
One of its early accomplishments was uniform training for canines that sniff for explosives. There are now agreed upon standards by which dogs can be certified and trained across the country, she said.
“There were many different types of dogs out there with different levels of efficiency,” she said.
The office also participated in a conference with its European Union counterparts, which are tackling the explosives problem. In the wake of the Christmas Day plot to down an airliner flying to Detroit, U.S. and E.U. officials exchanged useful information, she said.